San Francisco based artist, Hilary Pecis, present us impossible landscapes of Technicolor dreams. A distillate of sound and fury from a mass-media bricolage.

Chaotic colours dance against intricate patterns. Remnants of magazine pages hide within post-apocalyptical landscapes. Based in San Francisco, artist Hilary Pecis subsumes the visual language of advertising within the world she creates through ink drawings: reminiscent of a freeze frame image taken from an early music video, or, the aftermath of a Technicolor culture storm where popular media has imploded. It all sounds rather dramatic, yet this is the visual code Pecis creates for us – unashamedly using bold, bright colours to critique the capitalist machine pushing us towards what Pecis believes are “lifestyles that remains unobtainable, existing just beyond reach.”

What is one of the most interesting elements of her work is the visible collage and construction of available materials. In the tradition of the early 20th century Art movement Dada, smaller parts of mass media - such as advertisements and words - are used to comment on its function as a whole. Pecis provides us with a new and terrifying space where predictions of our current path of consumption are foretold. The Internet continues to expand exponentially, dragging Popular Culture through the muddy depths of consumption – it does make you wonder where this is all going. What will happen to Fashion, Design and, indeed, Art?

Explain your work to us as if we were someone who had never seen it before.

My collages typically depict a landscape of rock formations that are surrounded by images from advertisements. The rocks are made up of patterns within the strata that resemble codes. I imagine these codes give direction or the misdirection to the rest of the landscape. The rock formations are surrounded by images taken from media sources to make up the remaining landscape. There is a chaotic mood, suggested through the application of images popping up and piling up throughout the space.

  
Your work is described as depicting an 'imagined apocalypse' - what sort of apocalypse do you imagine? 

Well, I used to think of it as post apocalyptic place, but now I look at the landscape as a parallel reality existing at the same time. All of the images are taken from contemporary sources and just remixed. I see it as a dystopian landscape where the information was misplaced or misguided, yet familiar.

What, in the world you live in, makes your angry or passionate?

I feel that we live in such an image-based world, where images are used to describe and represent everything. The image portrayed by a person is closely related to commodities and that image is something that can be shaped through consumption. Images and information are also extremely prevalent on the Internet, and can also be consumed in the same way that a commodity can be consumed to form an identity. I love collecting images, from both digital and physical advertisements. They often have nothing to do with the item being advertised, but rather a supplement to suggest the feeling or identity that the commodity will bring. I like the shine produced by the studio lighting or Photoshoped images, which portray a hyper real environment that appears more real than reality. They are a sort of fiction that helps shape the decision-making made by many people.  

It's a visual party and everyone is invited - what do you like about using such strong colours?

I never felt I had a good sense of colour, and because I like all very bright true colours and therefore tend to use those within the collages. Sometimes I will make a piece with less bright/ more subdued colours, but they feel a lot more quiet and less aesthetically pleasing to me. Like I mentioned above, I have collections of images taken from magazines or digital sources that I keep in boxes and folders.  I like the landscapes to feel festive and chaotic and therefore am democratic in the application of colour- as long as there is a lot of it.



What is your process of choosing the different elements in your work? Or do they come to you by chance?

Well, for the most part they are all landscapes or spacescapes, but the accompanying images are less planned. When I am combing through magazines I look for bright and shiny images of different shapes to cut out. There are reoccurring images that I use, such as gems, because I know I like them and they are quite prevalent in advertisements. Some of the images are chance, and chosen for their texture or shape.  

Has fashion and design had an influence on your work? 

Yes. A while back I was just making ink drawings of rocky desolate landscapes. I liked them but wanted to add some colour. I didn’t know how to implement colour very well, especially because I was just using ink pens, so I started cutting out little, tiny pieces of paper from the magazine and inserting them around the ink drawing. My brother, who I was living with at the time, is an editorial hair stylist and was mostly working on fashion shoots for editorial stories and fashion ad campaigns. We had millions of fashion magazines around the house that he had discarded after removing the pages from the stories that he had worked on. The colours and the magic that appear in ads and editorial stories have absolutely been influential in my work, as well as actually using the physical magazine as a material. I love the wonderland that the stories can portray, and the hyper real situations within the advertisements.

Aesthetically, your drawings remind me of early music video clips, particularly the collage of two-dimensional elements with striking patterns - do you agree?

Yes. My collages have been described that way before. I am inspired by the flickering of images on televisions as well as the windows that pop up on the Internet. I was young when MTV first aired, but like most other people my age, I grew up watching it.

You have your own visual vocabulary - how did this come about?

I have rules that I set up for my drawings and for the images that I use. Mostly I subconsciously set up the rules, and later realized that I was following specific instructions. I don’t know if I want to talk about this part of my work too much, because it would probably make me out to be completely crazy. Ha!

Describe yourself in five words:

Oh geez... This is a hard one:

1.11273 (days old)
2.collector
3.watcher
4.googler
5.mover

Text by Marion Piper for VNFOLD